At the start of the Second Century there were a myriad of religions, cults, hundreds of gods available to worship. There was no “Christian Church”, in fact there were no “Christians” that we would recognise as such, there were gnostics who acknowledged a very human Jesus, there were Messianic Jewish sects that self described as “Followers of the Way” and considered Jesus as an adopted (very human) son of their god. Other and much older religions left their mark on this unrestricted storytelling, as was the tradition of nearly every religion of the time, except the Jews, who of course claimed to have the words of their god preserved from antiquity in their Holy Books. At the start of the 2nd century CE there were no codex, no orthodox texts until Marcion half way through the century.
Each “church/Temple/Synagogue had and venerated their own texts. The gentile ‘Christians’ each had their own rituals and venerated different texts. The Jewish ‘Christians’ reviled Paul as he was apostate. The Roman ‘Christians’’ added the “born of virgin” and of course the actual physical resurrection…and son of god. But then the Romanised Christians were certainly not in the majority, they were not powerful…yet. They were dwarfed by popular traditions in the East and schisms on their home turf.
There was indeed an explosion of the new religion but not as the evangelists like to think. It was not a steady spreading of the same texts and stories it was a chaotic spread of stories without license, some of them so far removed from todays “Christian” mainstream as to be a separate order of belief entirely. It was a time of chaos that persisted until the military takeover of the Roman church in the mid 4th Century.
One can see where some of these traditions have persisted right down to the resent day, distorted through time but still recognisable for their origins. Which brings us to this group, Number 3 in my series:
The Ophites, also known as Ophians (from the Greek word “ophis” meaning “snake”), were a Gnostic sect, in fact there were several sects and cults lumped together that existed from about 100CE and persisting to the present day under the umbrella title of ‘Ophites’.
Most numerous in Syria and Egypt they shared along with the Marcionites and Valentinians and other Gnostic cults a dualistic view of the gods, with the Jesus figure being of entirely spiritual significance.
They were rumoured depicted by Hippolytus of Rome in a lost work called the Syntagma.
The Ophites held a dualistic theology that proposed a purely spiritual Supreme Being (The unknown God), who was both the origin of the cosmic process and the highest good, to a chaotic and evil material world.
They regarded the Jehovah of the Old Testament as a demiurge, or lesser deity who had created the material world.
They did attach great importance to the serpent in the Book of Genesis because it had enabled men to obtain the important knowledge of good and evil, that Jehovah had withheld from them. Some used live serpents in their rituals according to their critics and considered the serpent to be a physical representation of the Jesus figure.
They believed that man’s dilemma results from his being a mixture of these conflicting spiritual and material elements.
They saw the serpent as the true liberator of mankind since it first taught men to rebel against Jehovah and seek knowledge of the true, unknown God.
The Ophites beleived the Christ figure to be a spiritual being who, through his union with the man Jesus, taught the saving gnosis.
This collection of gnostic, snake orientated sects was condemned by Hippolytus, Origen, Irenaeus, and Sad Old Clement of Alexandria.
Condemned by the Roman Church the Ophites were mostly a memory, or, practising deep underground by the turn of the 6th Century. Shades of their practices can be seen in the Appalachians and some extreme sects (churches) in the US and Philippines, as well as Africa where snake dancing continues.